Artists Announced for the 2019 Whitney Biennial

The artist list was announced today for the 2019 Whitney Biennial. Opening on May 17, 2019 and continues on view through September 22, 2019. Seventy-five artists were selected for this year's edition, which is organized by two Whitney curators: Jane Panetta and Rujeko Hockley. This is the 79th exhibition since its launch in 1932 by museum founder Gertrude Vanderbilt.

Artist selected include emerging to well-established artists and collectives who work in mediums that include painting, sculpture, drawing, installation, film and video; photography, performance and sound. The art will be installed on the fifth and sixth floors of the museum as well as in spaces located both outside and inside the museum. In making their selections, the curators visited over 300 studios located across the United States.

In addition, three guest curators were invited to choose 11 artists for the film program. The trio are are Maori Karmael Holmes (BlackStar Film Festival founder); Sky Hopinka (artist and filmmaker whose work was shown in the 2017 Biennial); and Matt Wolf (filmmaker and documentarian).

Over half the artists selected currently live in New York City or Brooklyn (40) with small concentrations from LA (7) and Puerto Rico (5) with two artists hailing from Miami, Philadelphia and New Jersey at large. Otherwise, artists are dispersed across the United States including those based in Chicago, Detroit, New Orleans, Portland, OR plus Arkansas, New Jersey, Massachusetts and other locations.

A few artists or collectives don't have a odvious connection to America as they were not born or work in the United States. The international contingency include artists or groups from Canada, London and Mexico.

The curators had this to say in the announcement:

Panetta remarked: “Ru and I especially focused on emerging artists and first time Biennial participants: approximately seventy-five percent of the artists in the show are under forty and only five have previously appeared in a Whitney Biennial. In part, this emphasis resulted from what we saw during our research across the U.S., as we were struck by the profound difficulties of our current moment and the ways in which so many artists we encountered are struggling and facing fewer opportunities to present their work publicly.”

Hockley noted, “Although intentionally broad in scope, the exhibition explores key themes, including the mining of history in order to reimagine the present or future, a profound and sustained consideration of questions of equity along financial, racial, and sexual lines, a concern with climate change, and explorations of the vulnerability of the body. Artists in the exhibition are engaged with notions of what community means and can provide while using art to confront and cope with our current world.”

Adam D. Weinberg, the Museum’s Alice Pratt Brown Director, commented: “Taking the pulse of American creativity and culture, the Whitney Biennial has been finding the future of contemporary art for nearly a century. The Biennial is an essential strand of the Museum’s DNA, a chance to reaffirm one of the Whitney’s deepest commitments: to support the work of living artists and to engage in a cultural dialogue about what contemporary art is and why it matters.”

Following is the full list:

Eddie Arroyo

Born 1976 in Miami, FL / Lives in Miami

Korakrit Arunanondchai

Born 1986 in Bangkok, Thailand / Lives in New York, NY and Bangkok, Thailand

Olga Balema

Born 1984 in Lviv, Ukraine / Lives in New York, NY

Morgan Bassichis

Born 1983 in Newton, MA / Lives in Brooklyn, NY

Blitz Bazawule

Born 1982 in Accra, Ghana / Lives in New York, NY

Alexandra Bell

Born 1983 in Chicago, IL / Lives in Brooklyn, NY

Brian Belott

Born 1973 in East Orange, NJ / Lives in Brooklyn, NY

Meriem Bennani

Born 1988 in Rabat, Morocco / Lives in Brooklyn, NY

Robert Bittenbender

Born 1987 in Washington, DC / Lives in Brooklyn, NY

Lucas Blalock

Born 1978 in Asheville, NC / Lives in Brooklyn, NY

Garrett Bradley

Born 1986 in New York, NY / Lives in New Orleans, LA

Milano Chow

Born 1987 in Los Angeles, CA / Lives in Los Angeles, CA

Colectivo Los Ingrávidos

Founded 2011 in Tehuacán, Mexico

Thirza Cuthand

Born 1978 in Regina, Saskatchewan / Lives in Toronto, Ontario

John Edmonds

Born 1989 in Washington, DC / Lives in Brooklyn, NY

Nicole Eisenman

Born 1965 in Verdun, France / Lives in Brooklyn, NY

Janiva Ellis

Born 1987 in Oakland, CA / Lives in Brooklyn, NY and Los Angeles, CA

Kota Ezawa

Born 1969 in Cologne, West Germany / Lives in Oakland, CA

Brendan Fernandes

Born 1979 in Nairobi, Kenya / Lives in Chicago, IL

FIERCE and Paper Tiger Televiesion

FIERCE founded in 2000 in New York, NY / Paper Tiger Founded 1981 in New York, NY

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